My Neighbourhood

Christian Stejskal is an award winning photographer, violinist, and storyteller. Over the past ten years, he has performed his multimedia shows in nine different countries in Europe, including a critically acclaimed appearance at the Edinburgh "Fringe Festival” (please read a review: https://threeweeksedinburgh.com/article/my-neighbourhood-christian-stejskal/), as well as in Africa and Asia. Additionally, he has also worked as a violin player in most professional orchestras in his native country, Norway such as the Norwegian Opera House, Stavanger Symphonic Orchestra, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Tromsø Chamber Orchestra, and Kristiansand Chamber Orchestra. Between 2010 and 2013 he worked as 1st violin player in the Cairo Opera Orchestra parallel with working on his book project called “My neighbourhood” about the Zabaleen. During 2013-14 he traveled all over Gaza during the course of 6 months and performed a musical fairy tale called "Ferdinand the Bull" for narration and solo-violin in each 185 UN-schools for Palestinian children, please view the following YouTube link from this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba7m--U01CM .

At the age of thirty, he received a calling from God to travel on foot from his birthplace of Vienna, Austria, via Jerusalem, and then on to the holy city of Axum in northern Ethiopia. He walked on foot across 10 countries in 20 months. After that, he spent 5 years with Cairo's “Zabaleen” – the city's informal Christian garbage collectors, writing short stories and photographing the population in the so-called “Garbage City”. Famous for farming pigs, the "Zabaleen" are controversial in Muslim Egypt because of this practice. He produced a photo book called “My neighbourhood” as well as a multimedia performance from this work, which he performed more than 250 times in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland. In the last few years, he memorized the whole Gospel of Mark in Norwegian, combined it with illustrative images and music to create a multimedia performance, and since 2020, he has performed this approximately 200 times throughout Scandinavia.

Then in 2022-23 he re-learned the whole book of Mark in the German language and is currently touring with the German version of his performance “The Gospel of Mark” in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. In spring 2024 and 2025 he started new series of concerts with his most recent performance called “The Upper Room” in England, Scotland and Wales. New performances are planned in the US and Canada in spring 2027. In between touring with his multimedia performances, he lives on an island on the Nile, between Cairo and Giza in Egypt, where he documents the local farmers and fishermen with his photo camera.